[hrothgar]

mike777, on Mar 8 2010, 06:48 AM, said:

Yes.....tuition hikes are basically are form of tax hikes...yes.....of course.....that is a main point the only main point...sigh........


Young people are protesting against what are tax hikes.....yes.......across the country.....tax hikes aimed at them.....students......

But Mike, students are cantaloupes and cantaloupes don't pay taxes...

[mike777]

edit: I paid taxes as a 16 year old student....I paid for college, tuition, rent, food, living...etc....

I have no doubt that many, many college students pay...pay themselves today......


We all thank the other taxpayers for helping but we paid for a lot of it.


As a Mcgovernite.... and being in Grant park in 68 I can understand protest.


I just do not remember such a widespread protest against what are basically tax hikes...

[jdonn]

I don't get it. If I go to the store and buy a loaf of bread, is the price of that bread a tax? Then I guess you were right after all Mike, everything is a tax, you win.

[mike777]

jdonn, on Mar 8 2010, 12:15 AM, said:

I don't get it. If I go to the store and buy a loaf of bread, is the price of that bread a tax? Then I guess you were right after all Mike, everything is a tax, you win.

you must be joking...of course the tax is in bread...sigh ..pls come on guys.....

If you do not think bread has a tax or that education has tax hikes.......you guys hit on the very nature of taxes and the public...........I just stop.......

[jdonn]

mike777, on Mar 8 2010, 12:21 AM, said:

I just stop.......

Thank you

[mike777]

thank you..

bread has many many taxes think about.....bread has many many taxes...sigh......


in this case young people protest education taxes..but bread has many

taxes...sigh....

Only in this case young people, many young people protest high taxes....

[jdonn]

What happened to "I just stop"?

[Lobowolf]

As an aside, students in the CA state university system, despite the recent fee increases, still pay a pretty small percentage of the total costs of their education.

[Winstonm]

Quote

tuition hikes are basically are form of tax hikes...yes.....of course

In private schools?

[awm]

The issue is that certain expenses are subsidized or even paid for by the government.

For example, the police force protects all of us from criminals. We don't have to pay a monthly bill to the police department for this service; instead, the local government foots the bill.

Of course, the government has to get money somehow, which it does for the most part based on various taxes. The main difference between a tax and a fee for service is that the amount of tax you pay is not directly related to the service you receive -- you can't "opt out" of the service and then avoid paying the tax for example. The reason that government does these things is that certain services are viewed as a societal good, or as basic human rights, and the feeling is that everyone should chip in (either equally, or proportionally to their perceived wealth) to help make sure that these things continue. They are frequently the type of thing where it'd be easy to "leech off the system" if payment were voluntary (i.e. a tragedy of the commons type situation, where my individual contribution doesn't make much difference in the vast scheme of things, so I refuse to contribute, but then everyone does the same and we are all worse off).

The issue that the students are protesting is essentially a belief that education should be subsidized by the government to a substantial degree. There are many arguments for this, in particular that an educated population is essential to a functioning economy, to social mobility, to a working democracy, and that large companies generally benefit from a pool of educated potential employees (regardless of whether they "chip in" to pay for the education). This is further complicated by the fact that many governments elsewhere in the world (i.e. Europe) subsidize education very heavily, and a refusal to do the same potentially puts the United States at a competitive disadvantage. The excellent (and heavily subsidized) University of California system is arguably a major reason that the computer/technology industry is based in the state.

In any case, this is effectively an argument that taxes should be higher, or at least that money should be redirected from something else to instead subsidize education. The amount that students pay in fees for their own education is a "fee for service" and not a tax -- the students believe that their fees should be lower and the government should finance more through taxes.

Calling these demonstrations "anti-tax" is highly inaccurate. Of course, the reality is that to some degree everyone wants lower taxes for themselves, and more subsidized government services paid for by taxes from other people. But the specific issue at hand is protesting against a cut in subsidies, not protesting an increase in taxes (or asking for a cut in taxes). In fact, the state of California is almost unable to raise taxes due to propositions voted into place in the 1970s. Instead, the current budget crisis has caused drastic cuts to government subsidized services like the California State University (CSU) and University of California (UC) systems.

[Rossoneri]

Don't even get me started on what's happening in the UK regarding university tuition fees and taxes....

[Lobowolf]

What, if any, is an reasonable percentage of the cost of their own higher education to expect students to pay?

[kenberg]

Lobowolf, on Mar 8 2010, 08:37 PM, said:

What, if any, is an reasonable percentage of the cost of their own higher education to expect students to pay?

A good question. I have a way of looking at it that suits me. When I started college, in 1956, tuition at the University of Minnesota was something on the order of $250 a year, a bit less I think. Minimum wage was in the neighborhood of a dollar an hour, typically I could get a job for maybe $1.25 or $1.50. With luck, I sometimes got as much as $2.00. So we are speaking of 200 or so, fewer with some luck, working hours to pay a year's tuition. OK, there was tax (real tax) on the wages but leave that be, both here and in the modern update coming next.

Assuming that a student can now get a job for around $7.50 an hour, then keeping things comparable would mean that tuition at a main campus of a good state university would be around $1,500 per year. At least here in Maryland, it's not even close. Even if the student can get $10 an hour, still 200 hours nets him $2,000, not nearly enough.


Of course it's not that simple. There are scholarships, reduced tuition, Pell grants, and so on. I benefited greatly from a scholarship myself. But the quality education at Minnesota for a very reasonable price was truly a wonderful thing. I believe such opportunity is worth preserving, and I think that society benefits as well as the individual. Many young people attended college who simply could not have done so with higher tuition rates.

Some things really were easier at one time.

[awm]

Lobowolf, on Mar 8 2010, 08:37 PM, said:

What, if any, is an reasonable percentage of the cost of their own higher education to expect students to pay?

I believe that anyone who's willing and able should be able to get a college education, and without being forced to work substantial hours during their schooling in order to do so (doing this tends to disrupt their classwork). However, I think it's reasonable to ask students doing this to take on a reasonable amount of debt provided it is negotiated at favorable rates and they will not need to pay it off until their college education is over.

So I guess my answer is, college costs should be completely covered by a combination of direct government subsidies and low-interest loans. Currently UCLA costs $8,851 per year in fees, plus $885 in required health insurance coverage and an estimated $1599 in books and supplies. This is on top of living expenses, which a full-time student presumably has to cover out of pocket as well. The total cost is estimated at roughly $25000/year. Ignoring the food and housing expenses, the total is a bit below $11,500 per year, for a four-year total of $46,000. The average salary for a college graduate right out of school (assuming they can find a job right away, which is extremely tough in today's economy) is roughly $46,000 a year. One should be able to get completely out of educational debt in less than ten years (this is about the time when people buy a house, which is another huge load of debt) and that seems tough given these numbers.

My view is that UCLA is thus slightly too expensive, even if we assume free availability of very low interest loans. The exact tradeoff depends on interest rates (which are often lower for educational loans than other types of loan), to what degree (if any) we factor in the living expenses, and what percentage of income is deemed "reasonable" expenditure per year for paying off a college loan.

[helene_t]

mike777, on Mar 8 2010, 06:55 AM, said:

in this case young people protest education taxes..but bread has many

taxes...sigh....

Right, any transaction could be seen as a tax in some generalized sense. So what the universities have to pay to get the teachers to work for them is a "tax", too.

Without "taxes", universities would be able to provide teaching for free.

I used to believe in the money-free society when I was young and left-winged. But maybe tax-free sounds cooler.

[y66]

At the University of Virginia, in-state students pay just under $10,000 per year for tuition and fees; out-of-state students pay $32,000. So, in-state students are probably paying about 1/3 of their tuition cost. After adding living expenses, in-state students pay about half the total cost of their undergraduate education. That split seems about right to me. If that's more than students can reasonably afford to finance at similarly subsidized interest rates over, say, 8 years, then I agree something is out of whack, but that's not something I as a taxpayer am willing to cover.

[kenberg]

As a college student, I strongly preferred working to debt. After undergraduate and graduate school I had accumulated debt that took a year or so to pay off. Ten years of debt re-payment would have been very depressing.

During my college days, at least at the early part, I had no clearly defined plan for my life. I liked college, I liked it a lot, but I did not view this time as an investment in the future. I just liked what I was doing. Taking on large debt should be done only by those who are far more mature than I was at the time (and then only if necessary).

The rise of the community colleges is a partial solution. The tuition is lower, the student can live at home. Not ideal perhaps. The community college mentality would not have suited me at all, and I was more than ready to leave home anytime after the age of fifteen if I could just figure out the economics, but life is not always perfect and we can't expect taxpayers to support all of our preferences.

It's not clear that this problem is entirely solvable. Far fewer students went to college in the fifties so it was easier to subsidize those who did. Not for the first time, I see life of a young person as being much easier when I was young. My granddaughter starts college this fall. Looking at all that is involved, I might have just said the hell with it.

[blackshoe]

My parents divorced when I was in high school. Part of their divorce agreement was that my father would pay for (undergraduate) college education for each of the four of us. He got off lightly. He paid for my first two years, for my younger sister's two years of community college, and for my brother's one semester. My siblings didn't continue beyond that. My last two years, and two years of graduate school, I paid for myself. It took me five years to pay off the loans.Given the huge increase in tuition alone since then (about forty years ago) I'm sure today it would take longer.

I went to an Ivy League school. Tuition has always been relatively high there, but if state supported schools still charge as little as I've seen in this thread, the gap is even larger now than it was then.

I note that the student population is down about 50% from when I was a student there.

[jdonn]

It's going to take me 30 years total to pay off my loans and I didn't even go to graduate school (well one semester that I paid up front). Along the way I had 2 small scholarship and 2 grants so it could have been even worse (well presumably the same with higher payments) and I had 1 or 2 jobs at all points in college as well, which is pretty amazing for anyone who knows how much OKBridge I played back then.

Actually I could pay them off much sooner if I wanted to but they are locked in at such a low interest rate it would be like throwing money away.

[hrothgar]

Lobowolf, on Mar 9 2010, 04:37 AM, said:

What, if any, is an reasonable percentage of the cost of their own higher education to expect students to pay?

Personally, I don't think that it makes sense to differentiate between "higher education" and primary / secondary education.

Take a look at the following chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

http://www.bls.gov/n.../empsit.t04.htm

The unemployment rate for individuals hold a college degree is roughly

1/3 of that for individuals without a high school diploma.
About half that for individuals with just a high school diploma.

The unemployment rate dips even more if you look at post graduate degrees of various types.

A college degree, in and of itself, is no pancea. (I would hate to be a brand new college graduate with a liberal arts degree, and I would be equally unhappy to be 10 years older and looking for work). However, things are a hell of a lot worse for individuals looking for traditional "Blue Collar" work. Some of this is a factor of increased competition with low wage countries over seas, however, "productivity" gains in North American manufacturing are every bit as much to blame.

Most of the wealth creation in the North American economy is shifting over to occupations that require significant investment in education. I think that public spending in education needs to increase in a commensurate fashion.

I'm not suggesting that the government should subsidize four years of drinking binges down at the Delta House. At the same time, I do think that its reasonable to provide anyone qualified the opportunity to attend college.

I do think that we might want to reconsider how we choose to finance college degrees. Lets assume that I am a recent High School grad. (I need to get a comprehensive scholarship from the government for whatever reason). I think there might be some real value in requiring the high school grad to spend a couple years doing some form of civil service before heading off to school (could be military, could be peace coprs, could be road construction)

I think that a couple years more maturity would help a lot once the students got to college and two years doing roofing provides a great illustration why it might be useful to crack down and hit the books.